Evaluation some aspects of growth, physiological, yield and quality of watermelon Charleston Gray cultivar grafted and un-grafted under salt stress conditions

Salinity is an important factor in limiting production in many countries. Today with using grafting methodinvegetable production could overcome problem of soil and irrigation water salinity resulted in production of high quality crops. In this study, water melon (cv. Charleston Gray) was grafted onto rootstocks including; Shintozwa, Buttle gourd, pepo, Bitter cucumber, Indigenous masses of Kermanshah and Hamedan watermelon with using hole insertion grafting method and grown under greenhouse and farm conditions in Faculty of Agriculture, Lorestan University in 2016. Grafted and un-grafted (control) plants were studied for some vegetative and biochemical traits after exposing to 0, 30 and 60 mM Na Cl. Results showed that there was a significant difference between the three levels of salinity treatment at the 5% probability level for leaf carotenoids. In this research, some of the vegetative traits such as length of main branch (220 cm), fresh weight of shoot (420 g) and root fresh weight (30 g) in plants that grafted onto Shintozwa rootstock in all three saline treatments were higher than non-grafted plant that were 102 cm, 225 and 10 g respectively. The highest (28467 kg ha-1) and lowest (10496 kg ha-1) total yield of fruit were related to the watermelon grafted onto Shintozwa rootstock and control plants respectively. Also, Shintozwa, Buttle gourd, Kermanshah and Hamedan watermelon rootstocks were a statistical group in terms of total yield. Thus, Shintozwa rootstock could be a suitable rootstock for water melon Charleston Gray cultivar under saline conditions.